ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 turns to Robert Louis Stevenson’s last published work, The Ebb-Tide. The novella is the far end of a trajectory that begins with the juvenile missionary periodicals and boys’ adventure stories Stevenson read as a child, but despite his youthful delight in Ballantyne’s The Coral Island, The Ebb-Tide rejects the boys’ adventure novel’s idealization of British heroism and civility. Instead, Stevenson journeys from avid consumer of exotic adventure to critic of Western imperialism, albeit influenced by his culture’s civilizational hierarchies and concerns. The Ebb-Tide disrupts Western myths of a prelapsarian “South Seas” and rewrites the three boys of The Coral Island as washed-out beachcombers, while the missionary has become a British trader employing kidnapped Pacific Islanders to dive for pearls. This chapter presents The Ebb-Tide as a narrative in which the evangelical precepts and imperial assurance of the earlier chapters are residual, with the concerns and assumptions that subtend them now the object of interrogation and critique. By working through the biblical Parable of the Pearl of Great Price and the history of colonial administration of the pearl fisheries in the Tuamotu Archipelago, Chapter 5 argues that in The Ebb-Tide, Stevenson redeploys the Atonement to question how the West is to address its responsibility for the violence and rapacity of empire.
